I used this space last week to write about the very real concern of our children isolating themselves by spending too much time on their smartphones. Studies show that pre-teens and teens are spending six to nine hours a day consuming media, mostly on their phones. Studies also show that those same pre-teens and teens are at higher risk for depression, anxiety, andsuicide than those who do not isolate themselves with their smartphones. We know these things if for no other reason than because I’ve been harping on them for weeks now! But has anyone seen studies on why our teens are giving their smartphones so much attention and thereby isolating themselves from humanity? I know there is more than one reason, but I want to suggest that at least one reason is the creators of social media apps planned it that way from the beginning.

Last year Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, went public with some bold reveals about Facebook in particular, but also social media in general. In an interview with the news website Axios, the content of which has been redistributed in news outlets such as Business Insider, the now-retired Parker confessed, “The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’”

I don’t know what the next question from Axios was, but it must have gone something like: Wait a minute, Sean Parker. Many of our youth have reached the point that they have no life outside of their phones, and you’re saying you guys planned it that way? To which Parker replied:

“And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you … more likes and comments. It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

Once we’re over the initial shock of statements like these from one of the creators of Facebook, a social media pioneer if you will, we might ask, But why? Why did you do it Facebook? And the answer to that question is really easy: money. The more time our children spend on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or Vine or Pinterest or fill-in-the-blank, the more they are exposed to the advertising these corporations sell. And when the social media corporations show those advertisers how much time our children spend looking at their ads, they can justify charging even more. It is a vicious circle, and our children are no more than pawns caught in the middle—expendable, interchangeable; their attention and time bought, sold, and traded like so many commodities.

Perhaps you think I am being harsh, not giving Sean Parker and the other social media creators a fair shake. Maybe you think all this time your kid spends with his face in his phone, hiding in the dark and ignoring his family, is really just an unintended consequence of an otherwise well-intentioned technological advance. Rather than say you are naïve, let’s just see what Sean Parker says: “The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously, and we did it anyway.”

Sean Parker is confessing what he and others have done to us, to our children, and we should be thankful the truth is coming out. Parker is not alone; dozens of tech workers are raising alarms, and many seem genuinely to regret creating the social media monster. They have successfully robbed us of our time and then turned it into cash.

During this season of my life, I am reading a lot about what it takes to cultivate virtue in myself and others. I am learning about the discipline required to grow faith and to practice it. Reading and studying Scripture, participating in corporate worship, serving each other, and praying are still the most important contributors to building habits of faith and cultivating virtue, but these things take time—a lot of time. Satan knows that. Satan knows the value of our time, of our children’s time. I pray we will wake up to the value of our time and commit to spending it growing in our faith and cultivating virtue instead of giving it away for someone else’s profit.

Concerning time spent consuming social media, Sean Parker warns, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” We’d do well to remember that those brains are attached to souls.

Note: Quotes from Sean Parker are taken from an article written in November 2017 by Rob Price for businessinsider.com.

“A man who isolates himself seeks his own desire; he rages against all wise judgment” (Proverbs 18:1).

I know a teenage girl who spends many hours a day on her smartphone playing games and posting on social media (and who knows what else). While the rest of her family engages in other recreational activities, mostly outdoors, she is content to and is allowed to spend her time with her phone. When she is forced to come out of her bedroom, at mealtime for example, she is sometimes sullen and often awkward in interactions with her family. Her contributions to the conversation are usually one sentence statements that are disconnected from the topic of conversation and seemingly meant to draw attention to herself—like an Instagram post. Even when the family detours from the original topic of conversation to engage her comments, this girl rarely has more to add, and her next entry will be as disconnected from the last one as it was from the family’s original conversation topic. It seems as if her time isolated with her phone has undermined her ability to communicate with other people in person.

In her latest book, iGen, Jean M. Twenge, PhD, writes about the generation that begins in the mid-nineties and has never known a world without the internet and cell phones. She calls them iGen’ers and expounds on how different their views are from those of other generations. As for electronic communication versus the real thing, she writes:

“As social media and texting replace other recreational activities and ways of communicating, iGen’ers spend less time with their friends and loved ones in person—which perhaps explains why they are experiencing unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness” (Twenge, jacket).

Loneliness? With such a huge group of people using social media platforms and commenting on each other’s posts, how could one be lonely?

One of the paradoxes of the smartphone and social media craze consuming our children is the fact that they can be electronically connected to so many people and at the same time so utterly alone. An online community, while inhabited by real people (mostly), does not always exhibit the same human qualities and characteristics as real flesh and blood communities. One reason for the difference is the layer of technology and space between members of an online community. If one person does not have to look another in the eye and then deal with the awkward tension caused by his words or actions because he is interacting electronically, he feels freer to say or do things he might not otherwise ever do in person. Such freedom is often out of the norm for human behavior and creates a community (online) wherein real humans (mostly) are interacting with each other in a way that is not always human. The result: in spite of the large crowds gathered on social media platforms, those participating get very little of the satisfaction that comes from interacting with real people face-to-face in the flesh.

It appears that isolating oneself with a smartphone and Instagram is little better than isolating oneself with nothing at all. Both cases leave one lonely and out of practice at dealing with other human beings. But what of the anxiety and depression Twenge mentions? How does isolating oneself with a smartphone and social media increase anxiety and depression for young people?

I don’t have all the answers to that question, but I suggest it has something to do with lack of human accountability. The girl I described at the beginning of this post has isolated herself, and she has parents who are disengaged. They do not know what is going on in their daughter’s life. They do not know who she is interacting with on her phone and they don’t know what she is imbibing on the internet. In fact, a recent study shows that she is in the majority because as many as 71% of teens are hiding their online behavior from their parents. And that stands to reason when 90% of boys and 60% of teenage girls report being exposed to pornography (even child pornography) by the age of eighteen—most of that via the internet and their smartphones. No wonder they’re hiding their online behavior. No wonder they’re anxious and depressed.

If your teenager has a smartphone with internet access, I want to encourage you to be an engaged parent. Protect your child not only from pornography but also from isolation and loneliness. Limit his or her screen time and consider allowing no screens in the bedroom—ever. Talk to your child about the dangers associated with too much screen time, about the dangers associated with the freedoms the internet offers. Consider installing software such as Covenant Eyes or Net Nanny or others to help safeguard your child against seeing something he or she will never be able to forget. Most importantly, be an engaged parent. Be a constant, appropriate presence in your child’s life. It is easy to say that today’s teenagers are just this way or that way as if we parents are helpless against the circumstances, but that is not entirely true. Parenting teenagers in the era of smartphones—parenting iGen’ers, if you will—may be different from parenting Millenials, but it is still parenting, and we will still answer to God for how we do it. Engage.

Last week I wrote in this space about cell phone use among teens. There is a lot to say about it. I can’t get to all of it, but it is a serious enough subject that I will revisit it more than once. There are a great many discouraging trends in our society today, especially among teens, which are beginning to be attributed to addictive smart phone use. Arguably the most concerning trend is the failing mental health of our teenagers.

Michael Ungar, Ph. D, therapist, researcher, and author writes in Psychology Today, “Kids are using their cell phones way too much and putting their mental health at terrible risk. National surveys are showing that kids today are more anxious than ever before, with spiking rates of depression and suicide.” Ungar also cites an uptick in Emergency Room visits for mood disorders and self-reported anxiety as part of the mental health crisis among teenagers.

How could cell phone use be causing such mental health trouble among our teens? I’m sure the possibilities are numerous and that the experts will elaborate on them all over time. The three I want to address here are bullying, something I will call cyber codependency, and isolation.

First, our teenagers are exposed to bullying as they never have been before. When I was a kid, the bully was the guy who threatened to beat you up if you didn’t give him your milk money, and he would follow through. Today the bully may still beat you up, but he also has social media tools to ratchet up the pressure; many of our teens are feeling the squeeze. Ungar writes again in Psychology Today, “A recent article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal by a group of researchers based mostly in Quebec, Canada, found that among a large sample of teens 59% reported moderate exposure to bullying, and 14% reported chronically high exposure to bullying, both in person and online.” Sometimes inexperienced, immature victims cannot see a way out of or through such intense pressure. As we have seen too often in recent years, the result can be tragic.

Next is the phenomenon I am calling cyber codependency. I am far from being a psychiatrist, but I am smart enough to see that many of our teens, and most especially girls, are getting their identities, their value, their self-worth from what others are saying about them online. In an article hosted on The Week and titled, “The Quiet Destruction of the American Teenager,” opinion writer Matthew Walther put it this way,

“Hell is not, strictly speaking, other people. But for a teenage girl, nine hours a day of other people evaluating your appearance and utterances as you attempt to negotiate their preferences and attitudes and jockey for some intangible sense of status is probably something very much like hell.”

As Christian parents, we are hopefully mature enough to know that our worth is found in Christ, not in what others think or say; however, a fourteen year old often does not have that same assurance, yet she has the whole world critiquing her selfies on Instagram. It is nearly impossible for her to be prepared for some of the responses she may receive to her naïve posts. How will she react? Many such girls, one in four to be exact, are responding by cutting or burning or otherwise harming themselves.

Finally, our teenagers are isolating themselves even as they think they are more connected to others than ever before. Social media, via the smart phone especially, has given us this sad paradox. The average American kid gets a smart phone long before he becomes a teenager, actually, and then spends an average of six to nine hours a day with his face glued to it, ignoring real flesh and blood family and friends in favor of those he interacts with electronically. If the isolation from community wasn’t bad enough on its own—and it is (Prov. 18:1)—there are other side effects that come with being connected to those you don’t know in a real flesh and blood sense.

One of the hottest trends is playing online games with people who could be halfway around the globe. You create your own handle and choose your own avatar and get to it. Sounds fun, right? Well, maybe, until your ten year old son is being flirted with in the game by some cute girl avatar that is actually being controlled by a 58 year old child porn addict in Jersey. Not so fun. But perverts aren’t the only danger. Just the other day I heard a report on NPR about a teenage boy who was being recruited into a Nazi group by a guy he met gaming online. By the time his dad figured out what was going on, he had almost lost his son to this recruiter. And he thought the boy was just playing video games. Withdrawal from a real community in favor of avatars comes at a price.

Friends, this is nothing, the tip of the iceberg really. There is some scary stuff out there. The truth is that we have put some mighty powerful and dangerous tools into the hands of kids who probably aren’t mature enough to handle them. We have opened Pandora’s Box and then passed it to our ten year olds like so much Thanksgiving turkey. The three things focused on here today are worth considering if your child has a smart phone because his or her mental health—at the very least—could be at risk, but there’s a whole lot worse where that came from. We haven’t even talked about porn and sexting yet. I implore you to do some research on your own. You should know what is out there, and you should know what your own child is doing on his or her phone. It is worth your time. Your kid is worth it.

Smartphones were turned loose on the world in 2007. How many of us have stopped to think that the average fifth grader has never known a world without smartphones? Today’s seventh graders were only two years old in 2007, so it is doubtful they can access much memory before smartphones. These children have always had the power of the internet and everything it brings with it right at their fingertips on their parents’ phones. Now they have it right in their back pockets because the average American child receives his first smartphone at the ripe old age of 10 (Psychology Today). As you might expect, that little number comes with some baggage.

Technology is moving so fast that parents often do not have time to get their minds around one gadget or game or social media craze before the next one has kidnapped their child’s attention. Don’t think it is any easier for school teachers and administrators either. Even though student cell phones must be in the backpack, in the locker, and turned off at Trinitas, the residual effect smartphones are having on school culture isn’t so residual. The age group from 10 to 15 years old is the hardest hit because they are not mentally, emotionally, or socially prepared to navigate the enormous responsibilities that come with having a smartphone and the data plan to go with it.

Some estimates are that teens spend six to nine hours a day on their phones (Psychology Today). This kind of usage could be considered addiction (or idolatry). Many parents are harrumphing right now because they cannot imagine how their child could spend that much time on his or her phone. I’ll tell you how: they aren’t sleeping! (The Conversation) Just recently a group of pre-teen boys told me that they regularly wake up at 2am to play Fortnite. One of the boys was sheepish about not being allowed to play until 8am; the others teased him.

The boys aren’t the only ones affected, though. Girls are also sleeping less while spending more time on their phones than on any other activity. For girls, it isn’t gaming that interests them; instead, it is searching for acceptance on social media. Jean Twenge, Ph. D., writes in Psychology Today:

… we found that social media use was significantly correlated with depression for girls … Developmentally, girls are more concerned with physical appearance and social popularity than boys are. Social media is a showcase of those issues, even quantifying them in numbers of likes and followers. Girls also spend more time on social media.

As it turns out, girls’ reactions to how they are perceived on social media can be dangerous. In fact, self-harm among girls between the ages of 10 and 14 has tripled since 2009. And by self-harm, I mean cutting or poisoning or something else serious enough for an ER visit. In short, our teenage daughters are looking for love in all the wrong places and are hurting themselves when they don’t find it (Psychology Today).

As a parent talking to other parents, I want to ask you a few questions. Does your child really need a cell phone, especially a smartphone, before he or she is driving? Does your teenage son or daughter have unrestricted access to the internet? Does he or she keep the phone in the bedroom? Do you have a way to check what the phone is being used for?

I firmly believe we are giving our children far too much freedom on the internet before they are mature enough to handle it. The effects on our culture are widespread, of epidemic proportions really. It is a disaster we are bringing on our own children. And why? For what reason? If our best answer is that everyone else is doing it and we can’t bear to tell our children no, then we need to carefully count the costs because they are high. I have only scratched the surface in this little blog. I encourage parents to do their own research. It will be well worth your time.

One goal not written in the Trinitas mission or vision statements is the goal of building a close community among Trinitas families, but it is our goal nonetheless. Community building isn’t a foreign concept at schools, and especially at the college level since it is a retention tool for colleges and universities. College students who might otherwise consider dropping out or transferring to another school may be reluctant to do that if they have grown close to their classmates, professors, and others at the school. For Trinitas, our reasons for building community run deeper.

Trinitas embraces content and pedagogy that are unique in our area. If a parent is struggling to understand why his second grader spends the school day singing and chanting and reciting rhymes instead of analyzing his feelings and doubling down on STEM, chances are he can’t ask his neighbor whose kid goes to XYZ school down the road to help him understand it. He needs to ask Trinitas parents to help him understand it, and not only other Trinitas second grade parents, but also parents of seventh graders and tenth graders who can tell him how what his child is doing in second grade will pay off down the road. If he has met and gotten to know those other parents, he can get answers to his questions that will most likely lead to a fuller understanding and deeper appreciation for the classical education his child is receiving.

Another reason community is so important at Trinitas is that we are living together every day at the school as Christians, holding each other accountable to live according to God’s ways. We work hard to cultivate virtue and Christian character in our students, but that takes community. Hillary Clinton famously said in the nineties that it takes a village to raise a child; in fact, she wrote a book by that title. I never did read the book, and I doubt Ms. Clinton and I would agree on all points regarding raising children, but her statement makes sense to me from a Christian perspective. It does take a like-minded group of people to give a child a solid foundation in the Christian faith. Parents need reinforcement from church and school; they need to have a community that believes the same thing they believe about raising children.

At Trinitas, we look for ways to bring our community together so we can build relationships with each other and get comfortable leaning on each other in this great task of raising our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. In the early days of the school, one of those ways we built community was Fall Festival. The whole school would turn out to eat barbeque, play games, and enjoy conversation with new friends under the shade of our sprawling oaks. As the school grew and we added sports, the calendar became so full that we dropped Fall Festival in lieu of tailgate parties at soccer and volleyball games. But for those of us who have been around a while, nothing can quite replace Fall Festival.

This fall, we’re bringing festival back! Times may have changed, the calendar may be too full, and the school may have grown, but we still need community. There’s no better time to make new friends and build the relationships that bind a people together than on a picnic blanket under a big oak tree with a belly full of barbecue. If you’re already part of the Trinitas family, I sure hope to see you there. All the details have been coming home to you in our weekly emails. If you’re not part of the Trinitas family, well, you just don’t know what you’re missing, but maybe it’s not too late. If you’re looking for a school that values community, you’ve come to the right place!

On September 16, 2004, Hurricane Ivan roared into Pensacola and changed the area’s landscape forever. Ivan brought sustained winds of over 120 miles per hour and spawned more than 100 tornadoes. The storm surge wiped houses off their foundations and destroyed the I10 Bridge over Escambia Bay. Some families and businesses in the Pensacola area were without electricity for as long as two weeks. Destruction was widespread from Baldwin County, Alabama to Santa Rosa County, Florida. At that time Trinitas Christian School was occupying a rented space off Summit Blvd that was not spared from the storm.

Trinitas Classroom after Hurricane Ivan

During the weeks after Ivan, many volunteers participated in the cleanup and restoration efforts at the school so students could return to classes and some sense of normalcy. Hundreds of man-hours were spent cleaning and drying and rebuilding. Reestablishing routine is an important step in recovering from any disaster, and getting students back in classes does just that for them. The Trinitas family was greatly blessed by the love of our neighbors after Hurricane Ivan.

Last week a group of thirteen Trinitas students traveled to Panama City with parents, teachers, and alumni to participate in Hurricane Michael relief efforts. The group spent the day working on the campus of Covenant Christian School, a classical school we have been acquainted with for some time.

Covenant Classroom after Hurricane Michael

Covenant sustained heavy damage to most of its classrooms and its gym. Ironically, a few old portable classrooms that now serve mostly as storage units were spared damage because they were sheltered by the gym. One of our team’s main goals was to reroute foot traffic on campus so those portables can be used as temporary classrooms while the main building is repaired. We relocated two large sections of fence and picked up truckloads of debris to open new walkways and make them safe. We also relocated a few truckloads of stored items to prepare those portable buildings to become classrooms again.

Covenant’s Gymnasium

When Michael hit with its 150 mph winds, even the strongest trees were no match for it. Our chainsaw crew cut up three giant pines that the storm blew down onto the playground and surrounding area. Volunteers, with a little help from a tractor we took with us, moved all of the debris of those trees into one pile that the county should pick up soon as part of the cleanup effort.

In that same area of campus, the storm picked up a 600 square feet artificial playing surface and moved it several feet off its concrete pad. Our crew disassembled the whole playing surface and relocated it to a safe area until construction on the gym is finished and the school can reassemble the playing surface in its proper location. Trinitas students also relocated picnic tables out of that construction zone and into an area where Covenant students can access them when they return.

Trinitas volunteers were unable to work on the hardest hit parts of the Covenant campus. We could not rebuild the gym, replace the roof, or haul wet insulation and soaked ceiling tiles out of classrooms. Fortunately, Covenant has already contracted with a company to make those repairs. We could, however, deliver supplies they needed and do the small things already mentioned to restore some normalcy in preparation for the return of students who desperately need to reestablish their routine.

After Ivan hit Pensacola fourteen years ago, Trinitas was the beneficiary of so much kindness and love in the effort to prepare our school for the return of students. We know what it feels like to be overwhelmed by the destruction of a major hurricane, and we know what it feels like when others help carry our burden. Often, you find yourself best suited to minister to those who are experiencing something you have previously experienced—adversity has a way of teaching us to better love our neighbors, and that was the case here. Trinitas is thankful that God prepared us to minister to Covenant Christian School the way others ministered to us fourteen years ago. Our prayers will continue to be with Covenant as they rebuild.

Every once in a while at Trinitas a student will ask, “Why do we do that anyway?” and it reminds me that we don’t always do a thorough job of communicating to students why we do the things we do. If the student also says something like, “My friend who goes to [fill in the blank] school doesn’t do that,” then it becomes clear that we are not talking enough to our students about the methods to our madness. There is more going on at Trinitas than reading, writing, and arithmetic.

One topic that frequently generates such questions is music. Trinitas students take music classes from kindergarten until tenth grade as part of the core curriculum. We desire every Trinitas student to graduate with the ability to read music and to sing the music they read with a reasonable level of proficiency. All Trinitas students from 4th through 12th grades are also part of one of our three choirs that practice throughout the year. Why would we put our students through all that music? Because music is an important part of their education, and not just any music either, but a hefty dose of classical music. In fact, we find music so important that we take students out of their regular classes each week for their private music lessons—this year, seventy-three Trinitas students are taking private lessons from one or more of our five music teachers. That is a lot of students in a small school like Trinitas.

There is an oft used Latin phrase in classical education: ad fontes, which means by extension to the source. In literature and history and language we take students back to the original sources of knowledge. We educate from primary sources where possible instead of filtering through textbooks. If you can know what the original text says, why would you settle for a version filtered through someone else’s opinion? In music, too, we want our students learning from the classical composers so that they are building a solid musical foundation with original building blocks. Simple music and electronic shortcuts are everywhere, but the student with a solid foundation will understand music and be able to recognize and appreciate beauty in music, and maybe eventually create original music as well.

Yes, we do music a little differently at Trinitas than the way they may do it in many other schools, but that’s because we have a different musical goal for our graduates than other schools might have. There is a method to our madness. For a good summary of the classical approach to music, a summary that both parents and students may find helpful, check out this Basecamp Live podcast.

Heaven knows I spill the ink in this space almost every week trying to convince parents about how Trinitas Christian School is different from other schools. I spill just as much ink explaining why Trinitas is different. It is hard to gauge how many people I have persuaded. I am painfully aware at times, though, that I have persuaded at least a few people in the Pensacola area that Trinitas is different, and that they view that difference suspiciously as if they think we are conducting some kind of weird and isolated experiment here with this classical Christian stuff.

Just to set the record straight about Trinitas not being a weird and isolated experiment, I am taking a different tack this week. I offer thisshort film (less than 20 minutes) as proof that Trinitas is part of global movement in classical Christian education. It is a movement made up of hundreds of schools like Trinitas all around the world filled with tens of thousands of students being educated just like Trinitas students. Many would say the movement is a course correction in education, the forging of a new path by going back to an old and proven method. We are organized under the Association of Classical Christian Schools which accredits only the best classical Christian schools in the world. Approximately forty schools currently hold accreditation with the ACCS—Trinitas is one of them.

Trinitas is different in the best sort of way, and we are not alone! Join us, won’t you? Enjoy the film!

Recently I had a conversation with a Trinitas Dad who dropped in for a visit. We talked about college and testing and the different personalities of his teenage children, and somewhere along the way he commented in passing that he had never allowed his children to play video games. He wasn’t bragging or even making a point with that statement; it was just necessary information for something else he was telling me, but that was what I wanted to hear about. How had a family with a house full of teenagers avoided video games without mutiny? When our conversation took a breath, I asked him why he had never allowed his children to play video games. I’ll paraphrase his response, which consisted of three main points, and I’ll chime in with some additional information.

He and his wife first made the decision to raise a video game free family because of the research they had read about video games causing psychological problems. He referenced the refresh rates on screens running video games as an early concern for him and his wife. A lot of research has been done since they made their decision, but few of the findings have been positive. In fact, too much screen time, including not only video games but also social media, is now being linked to attention deficiencies. Leonard Sax M.D., Ph.D. recently wrote an essay for Psychology Today in which he reviewed a new study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Sax says that “one of several reasons this study is so important is that it was a longitudinal cohort study, in which researchers followed the same group of kids over time.” The study also started with teenagers who had no symptoms of attention deficiencies at the beginning (JAMA). Their findings? You can read the study for yourself, but I think this one is pretty important: “Playing video games alone (even if playing with other people online) had a strong association with subsequent ADHD symptoms” (Sax).

Next, this Dad and his wife were adamant about providing their children a solid education. They knew that was their responsibility and that it meant more than putting their kids on a bus and sending them to school, even a good school. What they wanted in their home was a culture of reading. When we consider the tools of learning, there is none more important than reading. I would like to think this family has been encouraged in their love of reading by the Trinitas Boni Libri program, but that has not been the driving force—Dad and Mom have been the driving force behind the culture of reading in that family. Dad and Mom made the decision early on that they would forego screen time for page time, and that decision has made a positive academic and social difference for their children.

Finally and most importantly, this Dad and Mom found something very unchristian about a lot of video games. When a child plays video games on a phone or computer or TV screen, whether he or she plays Fortnite or Candy Crush, no community is being built. Christians are people made for community with other flesh and blood people—that doesn’t typically happen in a real way on a screen. Children left to their games tend to pull in, to focus on self. Those aren’t Christ-like attributes. What really got this Dad and Mom, though, was the violence.

In another Leonard Sax essay emailed to me last spring by Christian Schools of Florida, Sax is responding to a couple of articles from the New York Times that address gamer culture but do not address the negative social impact on gamers. He says the author “does not mention, and shows no awareness of, the many studies showing that playing video games excessively undermines social skills and increases distractibility. And, playing video games where the objective is to kill people – games such as Fortnite – over time, leads to gamers becoming less patient, and more likely to depersonalize other human beings” (Sax). This doctor’s recommendation to all parents? “NO games where the objective is to kill people. That means no Fortnite, no Call of Duty, no Grand Theft Auto” (Sax). (Emphasis his.)

Based on the scientific research and the doctor’s orders—not to mention what they could see with their own eyes—this Trinitas family made the decision to keep video games and most other screens out of their children’s lives. But how did they do it? They started early. They made their decisions early while they were developing a vision for their children, a vision that would draw them closer to God in the few short years they had to work with. They knew raising their children to the glory of God was one of the most important responsibilities they would ever have. They knew it was a timed event with eternal consequences, so they made the decisions they thought would help usher their children into the Kingdom, which might not have been the ones that made them seem like cool parents.

What is your vision for your children? Maybe that family’s decision about screens seems harsh or even radical to you, but it is an issue all parents in this age must have an answer for. What would be the justification for making the decision differently? How do we process the potential for attention related deficiencies in our children like ADHD? How does the time spent on video games and social media affect our children’s ability to get the most out of their education and their ability to flourish in community with other Christians? How do we as Christian parents help our children answer for the violence in a game like Fortnite? We live in a complicated time that requires much of parents; it seems as though there are a million important decisions to make. And even the decision about screens is more complicated than what I’ve presented here, but it is an important issue that we all must navigate somehow. How has your family navigated it? God bless you in your parenting!

Dr. Andrew Westmoreland of Samford University gave a commencement address in December of 2017 entitled “Respect Everyone.” The address was about as short a commencement speech as I’ve ever heard at just over six minutes, but what a powerful message he packed into that brief oration. In short, Dr. Westmoreland told an auditorium full of graduates, some earning doctorate and master’s degrees, that all their work had been in vain if they could not respect everyone. And he meant everyone. He went on to list types of people who don’t seem to get much respect in our society, among them the person who bags our groceries and the person who works the drive through line at the hamburger restaurant.

I’m sure some philosopher or historian somewhere could tell me when we started valuing people according to how much money they make. When it started, though, isn’t as important as the fact that we are fully engaged in it and need to stop it. Whether a grocery store employee or a Senator, a fry cook or a professor, all are made in the image of God. What’s more is that all have a role to play, their own unique ways of serving and loving each other. If a fry cook is consciously doing his job to the glory of God, then he is loving both God and neighbor in what he does—God because he commits his work unto Him, and neighbor because he does him a tremendous service by preparing him food.

When we are persuaded not to respect the grocery store clerk because he is, after all, just a grocery store clerk, our children pick up on that. Remember, as much of what they learn is caught from watching us and imitating us as is taught to them in classrooms. From watching our treatment of others, they learn how to treat others. If they learn from us not to value the grocery store clerk or anyone else who cannot afford to drive what Mommy drives, we have not only taught them to value people with high-paying jobs above other people, but we have also just put a tremendous amount of pressure on them for their own future. If Dad thinks little of the grocery store clerk, you can bet Junior won’t plan to be a grocery store clerk, or anything like a grocery store clerk. The pressure our high school seniors and college students feel is sometimes overwhelming for them, all because we have set a level of expectation for them we may not even have known we were setting.

Martin Luther has a famous quote encouraging cobblers to make shoes to the glory of God so that the cobbler’s work will be just as important as the minister’s. Dr. Westmoreland of Samford University says, “Respect everyone.” Jesus told us to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves. These are the kinds of principles that help guide a classical Christian education like we offer at Trinitas. We are certainly happy to know that many of our graduates get high-paying jobs and make lots of money after college, but that’s not the primary goal for Trinitas graduates. We are working to graduate students who understand the nature of humanity, who know beyond a shadow of doubt that the soul of the grocery store clerk is on par with the soul of the Senator, who know that to do good work at whatever job they choose is to love God and neighbor, and who live accordingly, respecting everyone.